The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough
Horrified, Fabius put out a hand in protest, let it drop. Caesar’s lictors rose and left the chamber in a profound silence.
“To dismiss one’s lictors is legal,” Caesar said. “It is not the fasces or their bearers who empower a curule magistrate. His power resides in the lex curiata. As this is a busy day, go about your affairs. Just remember what I have said. Under no possible circumstances will I entertain the thought of ruling Rome as her king. Rex is a word, nothing more. Caesar does not need to be Rex. To be Caesar is enough.”
Not all the tribunes of the plebs were bent on sucking up to Caesar. One, Gaius Servilius Casca, was already a member of the Kill Caesar Club, and two others had come under review by the club’s founders: Lucius Caesetius Flavus and Gaius Epidius Marullus. However, Trebonius and Decimus Brutus had decided not to invite Flavus and Marullus to join the club, much though they both hated Caesar. They were notorious blabbers, and neither had an ounce of genuine clout with the First Class.
On the day after Caesar let the Senate know how he felt about becoming the King of Rome, Flavus and Marullus just happened to be in the vicinity of the new rostra, which, as Caesar had built it at his own expense, held a bust of the Great Man on a high, hermed pedestal. Though the day was dull and cold, the Forum frequenters were out and about, wandering to see if there was an interesting court case going on inside the Basilica Julia—such a comfort to be under shelter if one was!—eating snacks from the stalls and booths tucked in out-of-the-way corners, hoping that some new orator would decide to mount a vacant set of steps or tribunal and declaim—in other words, an ordinary early January day.
Suddenly Flavus and Marullus started shouting and yelling, making such a fuss that they quickly drew a large crowd.
“Look! Look!” Marullus was screaming, pointing.
“A disgrace! A crime!” Flavus was screaming, pointing.
Both jabbing fingers were leveled at the bust of Caesar, a good one painted to lifelike verisimilitude; around its pale brow and thinning blond hair someone had tied a broad white ribbon, knotted it on the nape of the neck and strayed the two ends over the bust’s vestigial shoulders.
“He wants to be the King of Rome!” Marullus shrieked.
“A diadem! A diadem!” Flavus shrieked.
After a great deal more of the same, the two tribunes of the plebs tore the ribbon off the bust and trampled it showily beneath their feet, then ostentatiously ripped it into several pieces.
One day later, the Nones, the Latin Festival was held on the Alban Mount with Caesar officiating, clad in the ancient regalia of the Alban priest-kings, as was his Julian right.
It was a relatively brief affair, over and done with in short enough time for the celebrants to ride out of Rome at dawn and return to Rome by sunset. Riding Toes, Caesar led the procession of magistrates back to the city, where, for the second time, the new young patrician Gaius Octavius had acted as praefectus urbi in the absence of the consuls and praetors. For the ordinary people it was a popular occasion; those who lived adjacent to the Alban Mount went there and afterward attended a public feast, while those in Rome contented themselves with lining the Via Appia to watch the magistrates return.
“Ave, Rex!” someone called from the roadside crowd as Caesar rode by. “Ave, Rex! Ave, Rex!”
Caesar threw back his head and laughed. “No, you have the cognomen wrong! I’m Caesar, not Rex!”
Marullus and Flavus spurred their horses down the line from where the tribunes of the plebs rode to where Caesar was; mounts rearing and plunging spectacularly, they started to yell, pointing into the throng.
“Lictors, remove the man who called Caesar a king!” Marullus shouted several times.
When Antony’s lictors started to move, Caesar held up his hand to halt them. “Stay where you are,” he ordered curtly. “Marullus, Flavus, go back to your places.”
“He called you a king! If you don’t do something about it, Caesar, then you want to be king!” Marullus screamed.
By now the entire parade had come to a stop, horses milling, lictors and magistrates watching fascinated.
“Remove the man and prosecute him!” Flavus was shouting.
“Caesar wants to be king!” Marullus was shouting.
“Antonius, have your lictors put Flavus and Marullus where they belong!” Caesar snapped, red kindling in his cheeks.
Antony sat his horse, looking contemplative.
“Do it, Antonius, or tomorrow you’ll be a privatus!”
“Hear that? Hear that? Caesar is a king, he orders the consul around like a servant!” Marullus yelled as Antony’s lictors took hold of his horse’s bridle and led him back down the line.
“Rex! Rex! Rex! Caesar Rex!” Flavus was howling.
“Call the Senate into session tomorrow at dawn” was Caesar’s parting remark to Antony as he reached the Domus Publica.
This time his temper was up.
The prayers and auspices were over in a trice, the applause for the crown winners cut ruthlessly short.
“Lucius Caesetius Flavus, Gaius Epidius Marullus, come out!” he rapped. “Front and center of the floor, now!”
The two tribunes of the plebs lifted their buttocks off the tribunician bench in front of the curule dais and marched to face Caesar, chins up, eyes hard.
“I am fed up with being put in the wrong! Do you hear me? Do you understand me?” Caesar thundered. “I am fed up! I will have no more of it! Flavus, Marullus, you disgrace your office!”
“Rex! Rex! Rex! Rex!” they began to bark.
“Tacete, ineptes!” Caesar roared.
How he did it, no one ever knew when they thought about it afterward; simply that when Caesar got a certain look on his face and roared in a certain tone, the whole world quailed. He wasn’t a king. He was nemesis. All of a sudden every senator started remembering what a dictator could do without needing to be a king. Like flog. Decapitate.
“What has the tribunate of the plebs descended to, when a pair like you think you can behave worse than two scruffy schoolboys?” Caesar demanded. “If someone ties a white ribbon on my image, then take it off, by all means! That would win my approbation! But to make such a business out of it that a thousand people collect to hear you scream and shout—that is unacceptable conduct for any Roman magistrate, even the most unabashed demagogue who ever called himself a tribune of the plebs! And if some fellow in a crowd makes a smart remark, then let him! A soft answer and a joke turn him off, he’s rendered ridiculous! What the pair of you did on the Via Appia was unconscionable—you transformed some scurra in the crowd into a circus! What did you want to prosecute him for? High treason? Minor treason? Impiety? Murder? Theft? Embezzlement? Bribery? Extortion? Violence? Inciting violence? Bankruptcy? Witchcraft? Sacrilege? To the best of my knowledge, they are the sum total of crimes under Roman law! It is not a crime for a man to come out with a provocative remark! It is not a crime for a man to slander other men! It is not a crime for a man to calumniate other men! If it were, then Marcus Cicero would be in permanent exile for calling Lucius Piso a sucking whirlpool of greed, among many other things! Along with every other member of this House for calling some other member of this House anything from an eater of feces to a violator of his own children! How dare you blow trivial incidents up into major crimes? How dare you traduce me by making much out of nothing? I’ll have an end to it! Hear me? Do you hear me? If one single member of this body ever again implies—let alone says outright!—that I want to be King of Rome, let him beware! Rex is a word! It has connotations, but no reality in our Roman sphere! Rex? Rex? If I did want to be your absolute ruler in perpetuity, why should I bother to call myself Rex? Why not plain Caesar? Caesar is a word too! It could as easily mean king as rex does! So beware! As Dictator, I can strip any one of you of your citizenship and your property! I can flog and behead you! I do not need to be Rex! And believe me, conscript fathers, you tempt me! You tempt me! That is all. You are dismissed. Go!”
The silence was mor
Gaius Helvius Cinna rose from the tribunician bench and went to a place from which he could see both Caesar and the miscreants, who stood shivering in their senatorial shoes.
“Conscript fathers, as president of the College of Tribunes of the Plebs,” he said, “I move that Lucius Caesetius Flavus and Gaius Epidius Marullus cease forthwith to be tribunes of the plebs. I further move that they be expelled from the Senate.”
The House broke into tumult, fists waving. “Expel! Expel!”
“You can’t do this!” cried Lucius Caesetius Flavus Senior, rising to his feet. “My son doesn’t deserve this!”
“If you had any sense, Caesetius, you’d disinherit your son for sheer stupidity!” Caesar snapped. “Now go, all of you! Go! Go! I don’t want to see your faces again until you can start to behave like responsible Roman men!”
Helvius Cinna promptly marched outside, convened the Plebeian Assembly and enacted the dismissal of Flavus and Marullus from the College of Tribunes of the Plebs and the Senate. He then conducted a brisk election: Lucius Decidius Saxa and Publius Hostilius Saserna became tribunes of the plebs.
“I hope you realize, Cinna,” said Caesar gently to Helvius Cinna when the meeting was over, “that today is feriae. You’ll have to do it all again tomorrow, when the comitia can meet. Still, I appreciate the gesture. Come and have a goblet of wine at my house, and tell me about the new poetry.”
The “King of Rome” campaign suddenly died as if it had never been. Those who had not heard Caesar explain that there was no reason why “Rex” and “Caesar” couldn’t mean the same were apprised of his remark, and swallowed convulsively. As Cicero said to Atticus (they were still getting nowhere with the Buthrotum immigrants), the trouble was that people tended to forget what kind of man Caesar actually was until he lost his temper.
Perhaps as a result of that memorable meeting, on the Kalends of February the House met under Mark Antony’s auspices, and voted Gaius Julius Caesar the Dictator Perpetuus. Dictator for life. No one, from Brutus and Cassius to Decimus Brutus and Trebonius, had the courage to stand to the left of the curule dais when the division was called. The decree passed unanimously.
2
Twenty-one men now belonged to the Kill Caesar Club: Gaius Trebonius, Decimus Brutus, Staius Murcus, Tillius Cimber, Minucius Basilus, Decimus Turullius, Quintus Ligarius, Antistius Labeo, the brothers Servilius Casca, the brothers Caecilius, Popillius Liguriensis, Petronius, Pontius Aquila, Rubrius Ruga, Otacilius Naso, Caesennius Lento, Cassius Parmensis, Spurius Maelius, and Servius Sulpicius Galba. Apart from his loathing of Caesar, Spurius Maelius had given a peculiar, if logical, reason for joining the club. Four hundred years earlier, his ancestor, also named Spurius Maelius, had tried to make himself King of Rome; to kill Caesar was a way to remove the lingering odium from his family, which hadn’t prospered since. The acquisition of Galba had delighted the club’s founders, for he was patrician, an ex-praetor, and had enormous clout. During the early period of Caesar’s Gallic War, Galba had conducted a campaign in the high Alps and bungled it so badly that Caesar quickly dispensed with his services; Galba was, besides, one of Caesar’s cuckolds.
Six of the members could claim some sort of distinction, but unfortunately the rest were, as Trebonius said despondently to Decimus Brutus, a pathetic bunch of would-bes and has-beens.
“About the best one can say is that they’ve all been mighty close-lipped about it—I haven’t heard a whisper that the Kill Caesar Club exists.”
“Nor I,” said Decimus Brutus. “If we could only get two more members with Galba’s clout, I’d call the club big enough. Once it gets over twenty-three, the business would turn into a free-for-all worse than the fight for the October Horse’s head.”
“The business bears some similarity to the October Horse,” Trebonius said reflectively. “When you think about it, that’s what we aim to do, isn’t it? Kill the best war horse Rome owns.”
“I concede your point. Caesar’s in a class all by himself, no one can hope to eclipse him. If hope existed, there would be no need to kill him. Though Antonius has grand delusions—pah! We should kill Antonius as well, Trebonius.”
“I don’t agree,” Trebonius said. “If we want to live and prosper, we have to make it scream patriotism! Kill even one of Caesar’s minions, and we stand as rebels and outlaws.”
“Dolabella will be there, and he’s a man you can deal with,” Decimus Brutus said. “Antonius is a wolfshead.”
Decimus Brutus’s steward knocked on the study door.
“Domine, Gaius Cassius is asking to see you.”
The two exchanged an uneasy glance.
“Send him in, Bocchus.”
Cassius entered rather hesitantly, which seemed odd; he was ordinarily anything but hesitant.
“I’m not intruding?” he asked, sniffing something in the air.
“No, no,” said Decimus Brutus, drawing up a third chair. “A little wine? Some refreshments?”
Cassius sat with a thump, linked his hands and twisted them. “Thank you, I need nothing.”
A silence fell that was curiously difficult to break; when finally it did, it was Cassius who spoke.
“What do you think of our dictator for life?” he asked.
“That we’ve made a rod for our own backs,” said Trebonius.
“That we’ll never be free again,” said Decimus Brutus.
“My sentiments exactly. And those of Marcus Brutus, though he doesn’t believe there’s a thing we can do about it.”
“Whereas you believe there is, Cassius?” Trebonius asked.
“If I had my way, I’d kill him!” said Cassius. He lifted his amberish brown eyes to Trebonius’s face and saw things in its dismal planes that made him catch his breath. “Yes, I’d kill this millstone around our necks.”
“Kill him how?” Decimus Brutus asked, as if puzzled.
“I don’t—I don’t—I don’t know,” stammered Cassius. “It’s a new thought, you understand. Until we all voted to make him the dictator for life, I suppose I had reconciled myself to a number of years of him, but he’s indestructible! He’ll still be attending meetings of the House when he’s ninety—his health is fantastic and that mind will never let go.” As he spoke, Cassius’s voice grew stronger; the two pairs of light eyes staring intently at him were echoing everything his roiling thoughts had been turning over. He understood that he was among friends, and visibly relaxed. “Am I the only one?” he asked.
“By no means,” said Trebonius. “In fact, join the club.”
“Club?”
“The Kill Caesar Club. We called it that because, if its existence became known, we could explain it away as a joke name for a group of men who don’t like Caesar, and have clubbed together to kill him politically,” Trebonius said. “So far it contains twenty-one members. Are you interested in joining?”
Cassius made up his mind with the same speed he had at that meeting along the Bilechas River when he had decided to abandon Marcus Crassus to his fate and gallop for Syria. “Count me in,” he said, and sat back. “Now I’d appreciate some wine.”
Nothing loath, the two founders proceeded to acquaint Cassius with the club, its duration, its aims, why they had resolved to kill the October Horse. Cassius listened eagerly until he was told the names of the members.
“A paltry lot,” he said flatly.
“You’re right,” said Decimus, “but they lend us one important thing—bulk. It could be a political alliance—there were never many boni, for example. At least they’re all senators, and there are too many to indicate a feel-in-the-dark conspiracy. Conspiracy is the one word we don’t want attached to our club.”
Trebonius took over. “Your participation is a bonus we had despaired of earning, Cassius, because you have real clout. But even a Cassius and a patrician Sulpicius Galba may not be enough to imbue the deed with the—the heroism it must
“Brutus!” Cassius cried, interrupting. “Brutus! Now that Cato is dead, we have to have Brutus in the club! The direct descendant of the first Brutus, and, through his mother, the heir of Servilius Ahala as well! If we can persuade Brutus to join us, we’re free and clear—no one would dream of prosecuting us.”
Decimus Brutus stiffened, eyes flashing cold fire. “I am a direct descendant of the first Brutus too—do you think we haven’t already thought of that?” he demanded.
“Yes, but you’re not connected to Servilius Ahala,” Trebonius said. “Marcus Brutus outranks you, Decimus, and there’s no use getting angry about it. He’s the richest man in Rome, so his clout is colossal, he’s a Brutus and a patrician Servilius—Cassius, we have to have him! Then we’ll have two Brutuses, we can’t fail!”
“All right, I see that,” Decimus said, anger dying. “Yet can we get him, Cassius? I admit I don’t know him very well, but what I do know of him suggests he wouldn’t be a party to tyrannicide. He’s so docile, so tame, so anemic.”
“You’re correct, he’s those and more,” Cassius said gloomily. “His mother rules him—” He stopped, brightening. “Until, that is, he married Porcia. Oh, the fights! There’s no doubt that Brutus has more gumption since he married Porcia. And the Dictator Perpetuus decree horrified him. I’ll work on him, persuade him that it’s his moral and ethical duty as a Junius Brutus and a Servilius Ahala to rid Rome of her present tyrant.”